Services > Leading transition > Engaging people

Engaging people >

Whatever the pressure and drivers for change, and irrespective of desired outcomes, every organisational change programme impacts upon people (always employees, mostly customers, and very often third parties).

We believe that engaging with people has a more fundamental purpose - performance in organisations, especially service based organisations is as much, if not more, about the attitude and behaviours of individuals as it is about process and technology. Show me an organisation that is high performing in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and customer experience, and we'll show you an organisation that concentrates on staff attitudes and behaviours.

Our experience reinforces the people-focused change model set out by Lewin, a pioneer in the field of social psychology of organisations. According to this model, the first change step is to unfreeze the present pattern of behaviour as a way of managing resistance to change. We focus our attention at this stage on communicating the need for change through metaphor and personalising the change in terms that make sense to individuals. We work with employees through group visioning workshops, presentations, team games and role play. Our methods are intended to make people address the need for change, heighten their awareness of their own personal behaviour and attitude, and make them more open to the change process.

The second step, Movement, we put in place the changes that will move the organisation to the desired level of response (this may be a single step movement or several incremental steps). At the end of this phase we would expect to see. for example, individuals exhibiting changed behaviours, perhaps new skills and practices; changes in structures and reporting relationships; reward systems that incentivise and reinforce new behaviours, and so on.

The final step, Refreeze, is about stabilising and institutionalising the changes through systems that ground and secure the new behaviours and practices as the 'norms' and accepted ways of working.

We help build consensus and support for change before initiating action. We do this through communication and employee engagement. We work alongside key stakeholder groups in stimulating, generating and choosing from the most creative solutions offered by the best minds in the organisation. We help clients think through the ramifications, presenting compelling arguments to dislodge preconceived ideas or blindly following past practices. We proactively guide staff in intuitively desired directions, generating more awareness of critical issues and forcing thinking and ownership down to lower levels to achieve greater involvement. We help clients to broaden political support, build and sustain critical momentum to ensure a successful outcome.